Couillard should be on easy street. He’s not

"This will be the first of 14 election campaigns since 1970 in which sovereignty is not on the ballot. PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée is running on a no referendum ticket. The promise or threat of a referendum has always been worth at least five points for the Liberals."

By all the economic and fiscal rules of the political game, the Quebec Liberals of Philippe Couillard should be on cruising speed to re-election in October.

Consider: Quebec’s unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent in April is below the national average of 5.8 per cent, and below Ontario’s at 5.6 per cent. Only British Columbia, at 5.0 per cent, is lower than Quebec. Since the Liberals took office in May 2014, the Quebec economy has created nearly 225,000 jobs, more than 150,000 of them in the private sector.

When Robert Bourassa first ran as Quebec Liberal leader in 1970, he famously promised to create 100,000 jobs in his first term. Not for nothing was he known as “Bob le Job”. The Couillard Liberals have created more than twice as many as that in their first term.

Carlos Leitão, arguably the best finance minister in the land, has presented four balanced budgets in a row. More than that, the Liberals ran a surplus of $850 million in the last fiscal year, while paying down $2.3 billion in debt to the province’s Generation Fund. Talk about the FISC being in good shape.

This is while Ontario wallows in a $6.7-billion deficit, which the provincial auditor-general warns will actually come in at $11.7 billion in the current fiscal year. Since the Ontario Liberals took office in 2003, the provincial debt has tripled to more than $300 billion, on track to hit 40 per cent of GDP.

And yet, despite being a good government, the Quebec Liberals would get pounded at the polls if an election were held today.

In a poll for Le Devoir over the weekend, the usually reliable Léger Marketing had the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) at 35 per cent, and the Liberals a bad second at 26 per cent, down three points in the last month. The Parti Québécois (PQ)was at 22 per cent, with the left-wing Québec Solidaire at 10 per cent.

And when you look inside the numbers, it gets even worse for the Liberals.

In the francophone vote — 85 per cent of the electorate — the CAQ is at 41 per cent, the PQ at 26 per cent, with the Liberals distant also-rans at 16 per cent.

These numbers would produce a big CAQ majority in the 125-seat legislature, with the Liberals reduced to an enclave of seats delivered by anglophone and allophone voters in and around the Montreal area. (In the current National Assembly, the Liberals have 68 seats, the PQ 28, the CAQ 22, QS has three, and there are six independents)

The attitudinals in the Léger poll also bode ill for the Liberals. Thirty-seven per cent of respondents thought the CAQ would win the election, while only 22 per cent thought the Liberals would.

The level of dissatisfaction with the Couillard Liberals is 69 per cent, up three points from last month, with only 14 per cent wanting to continue with a Liberal government. “We found,” Léger reports, “that even one Liberal supporter in five (21 per cent) wants a change in government.”

Never has a party that has governed so well found itself in so much trouble less than six months before an election. And no first term majority government since the Union Nationale in 1970 has been kicked out after only one term in office.

One senior minister, Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, may be the most unpopular Quebec political figure of the modern era. But for reasons known only to himself, Couillard has refused to move him off the firing line in a cabinet shuffle.

There’s another reason for the Liberals’ lagging fortunes — this will be the first of 14 election campaigns since 1970 in which sovereignty is not on the ballot. PQ Leader Jean-François Lisée is running on a no referendum ticket. The promise or threat of a referendum has always been worth at least five points for the Liberals. Bourassa used to call it “the ballot box bonus.” The last election turned on a single soundbite from PQ star candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau, pumping his fist and declaring “we want a country.”

Another ominous sign for the Liberals is the number of MNAs who are not running again — 14 so far, including five ministers, with more to come. The Liberal speaker of the Assembly, Jacques Chagnon, is expected to retire when the legislature rises in June. Some of the safest Liberal seats in the province, such as Nelligan on Montreal’s West Island, are being abandoned by ministers once thought to have promising futures.

One thing Couillard has been getting is a little help from his friend Justin Trudeau, who has strong favourite-son standing in Quebec.

They appeared together on consecutive days last week, and no one can remember that ever happening. In the Saguenay on Thursday, Trudeau announced a $60 million investment in a new carbon free aluminum smelter to be built by Alcoa and Rio Tinto. (Trudeau then turned around three days later and called a federal byelection in the riding of Chicoutimi—Le Fjord)

Trudeau and Couillard then travelled to Lac-Mégantic on Friday to announce joint federal-provincial funding, on a 60-40 basis, of a $133 million rail by-pass of the town struck by the disaster of five summers ago. It will be another four years before the by-pass is complete.

Looking ahead to the campaign, one thing that could help Couillard is the debates, as there will be three of them, including one in English. Couillard shone in the 2014 debates, while debates are not known as CAQ Leader François Legault’s strength.

But Couillard and the Liberals have to start moving the numbers their way, especially the francophone vote. As of now, that’s their best and only hope of winning.

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Author

L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.